Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll

The reality is that the only thing that matters is do you have an unfair advantage? Have you figured out a way to capture attention and turn it into profitable demand?

Being able to reframe things. I mean, I mentioned liquid death. But when people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions of it and say, how do we compete on those?

Bait and switch can be evil unless the buyer is delighted with the thing you've switched them for, or you also deliver the thing you promised

It's this whole strategy. Product managers...our tendency is to want to make the product just one more feature...the reality is your product may already be a perfect fit for a market you're ignoring

What has technology done to change the relative risk and the relative fungibility of each of those steps? And I think for any organization, re-evaluating the processes that you assume are correct based on what technology has made hard or easy

To give the customer a different set of dimensions...reframing isn't just about competing on existing dimensions; it's about giving the customer a different set of dimensions

We think that subversiveness is a skill you can learn. We spend a lot of time understanding it, talking to neuroscientists, and finding examples throughout history

A growth hack traditionally is sort of product agnostic...We like the term zero-day marketing exploits because it's the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in

Spend some time thinking about how to be disagreeable, understanding the system you're in, then use the need for novelty and disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a supervillain

I think the motto that informs things the most that I work on these days is: it's amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets credit

If you are a hippie natural person, you reject clinical science and you reject traditional beauty norms. So you're orthogonal to both sex appeal and healthcare, and it's a perfect position

Sometimes the buyer upgrade is like getting out of your own way

If you're talking to an investor and you don't have a zero-day go-to-market exploit that creates attention and turns it into sustainable, lucrative demand, you are probably going to fail

We like the term zero-day marketing exploits because it's the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in

When people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions of it and say, how do we compete on those? The dimension only matters if a lucrative, reachable target market thinks that it is the dominant criteria for deciding about the product

The strength of your cards isn't how you win in poker...you win by bluffing. You win by subterfuge. You win by looking for your opponent's tells

The trick is to find these kinds of approaches that are fundamental to your business model. And for that, you have to look at how do you differentiate?

One of my favorite examples of system awareness is a Stanford prof named Tina Selig...the winning class sold its three minutes to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford grads

The key is to go find your own. And I think that finding that go-to-market strategy, that unfair, unprecedented, we call them zero-day marketing exploits, is as important as building the right product feature

A hedge fund is an organization formed to discover something that will be illegal and do it until it is

People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of the solution

The dumbest thing in the world is to talk. So that's the thing you want to not tell anyone about. But if you're talking to an investor and that you don't have a zero-day go-to-market exploit that creates attention and turns it into a sustainable lucrative demand, you are probably going to fail

The reality is that the only thing that matters is do you have an unfair advantage? Have you figured out a way to capture attention and turn it into profitable demand? And that's an afterthought or not even a thought. So the more startups and the more founders that we can remind the distribution matters and that subverting the norms and getting the system to behave in a way that gives you an advantage is important but better

It's not that they did something evil. It's that they did something to use a system in a way its creators didn't intend

Some of these tricks are now known, right? There was a time when things like an invite list, where if you invite someone you get an earlier spot in the invite, that was, there was a time that was the first time, you know, the Dropbox model of when you invite someone you both get more storage. That was cool the first time. If it works, it just becomes marketing

When by definition your startup is like a disagreement with the status quo. And the status quo was created by those in power. So they're naturally not going to like it when you don't play by their rules. They very quickly label you as evil. And so the name's kind of tongue in cheek. It definitely gets people's attention

The underlying idea of the book is that you've got to get the system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend. That's a hugely important idea. But to do that, you need to understand, I mean, your startup is a disagreement with the status quo. So you got to recognize what is the status quo, right?

Some of them went and got bike pumps and they offered to test people's bike pressure for free and then pump it up for like some money and it turns out they made even more money when they asked for donation. They did pretty well. They turned their five bucks into like 200 bucks. Another class did a slightly different thing. They went to restaurants and stood in line at fancy restaurants and got the pagers and then sold their space in line during premium lunch hours. They made about 250, right?

The winning team made $650, $605 somewhere in that range. You know what they did. What would you do here? I can't even so let me recap because this is important. You got $5 in seed capital. You got five days to plan two hours to execute and then you're going to present your findings in front of this class, the graduate class with Stanford Entrepreneurship for three minutes. So I listed four things there. The winning class sold its three minutes to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford grads

I was talking to a company that was selling drones invented for bridge inspection. Bridge inspection is actually a really dangerous job. There are people who are continuously exploring the bridge for cracks and stuff. The city council doesn't really want to pay for it. It's a cost and if they find something wrong, they have to fix it. Who does care? It turns out to insurance companies